The New Breed of Team Applications: Which Are Right for You?

As the growth of distributed teams continues to skyrocket, the need for online tools to coordinate teams is growing right along with it. In this article, Jeremy Wright looks at five key apps that will help your team to work as a collaborative unit, whether they're on different continents or in shared-wall cubicles.

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We’ve all observed how teams, departments, and companies have been
changing over the last decade or so. Telecommuting is more common; the practice
of hiring people who never even come onsite is growing. It should come as no
surprise, then, that tools to help teams communicate "beyond email"
are springing up like hippies at a Rolling Stones concert.

During the dotcom bubble, a number of products emerged that were supposed to
help teams work more effectively. Most of these tools were too complex, too
ineffectual, or just so far ahead of their time that they ultimately failed, for
whatever reason. In addition, most companies simply weren’t ready to hand
over the reins of control to an offsite team for something as core to the
business as communication.

But times have changed. Between the rise of the telecommuter and the changes
that Salesforce.com has made on the business world by making it okay to
outsource critical data and services, the industry is ripe for tools and
applications that make it easier and more effective for teams to communicate,
manage themselves, and work together—whether they’re 2,000 miles
away or just down the hall.

In this article we’ll examine the changing dynamics of teams, and the
applications that meet the needs of these "new teams."

A Long, Hard Road

In the beginning, there was email. But everyone knew that email was an awful
way to actually share documents. Sure, Word and Office docs, as well as
comparable applications, came with basic change tracking, but merging those
changes has always been an incredible hassle.

Then came document management systems, e-document systems, and other such
means of trying to simply manage getting teams to work on the same files. The
late 1990s introduced centralized project management portals, document sharing
portals such as SharePoint, and other technologies that tried to allow team
members to stay connected to the "mothership."

During the bubble, a number of projects rose up to try to connect people more
easily. Some were IM-based, some were web-based. The problem with these
applications was twofold:

Broadband wasn’t pervasive. It’s really
difficult to work with document management, project management, or even
calendaring without a fast connection to the Internet and to the server.

IT wanted control. Sharing any data—but particularly
sensitive customer relationship management or financial data—was totally
beyond what IT and executives were willing to risk in the 1990s.

Both of these barriers have been shattered in recent years. Broadband
penetration is well above 50% (for businesses, more like 95%). And,
according to Central Desktop’s CEO Isaac Garcia,
Salesforce.com (and other applications like it) helped make sharing data
acceptable and even valuable.

Since the bust, many applications have grown up that take advantage of these
changes in attitude. They attempt to provide teams with a simple and effective
way of tackling such common problems as document sharing, project management,
communication (beyond email), and calendaring. Many of these apps are grouped in
among so-called "Web 2.0" companies, but most of them prefer to think
of themselves as simple enablers for overstressed teams.